Tag: free speech

New Mexico Found a Way to Fine Platforms for Speech It Didn’t Delete

A civil jury has found Meta liable for violating New Mexico’s Unfair Practices Act, and now the judge is being asked to order the company to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion.

At a hearing on October 1 in Santa Fe, special prosecutor Randi McGinn asked Judge Francis Mathew of the First Judicial District Court to order Meta to pay this amount, while a lawyer for the social media giant said such a penalty would be “an astronomical” one, violating “a host of constitutional provisions.”

Meta is being punished for making false statements about user privacy, and also for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough.

The verdict was delivered on September 25, finding Meta had made 26 false or misleading statements, resulting in nearly 43.9 million violations of the state’s Unfair Practices Act.

This would translate to a maximum of $5,000 per violation, or $219 billion in all – more than the $206 billion the tobacco industry had to pay in a settlement in 1998. The state asked for about 20% of this amount.

The number of violations was arrived at by counting the number of people in New Mexico, and the number of Facebook users in the state, and then multiplying these numbers by the number of times Meta made false statements in news outlets and on its own platforms.

The state had to show only that harm was likely, not that it actually occurred.

Meta is being punished for lying about how it handled user data, and the Cambridge Analytica scandal that saw a third party harvest data from about 87 million profiles. The company is also being punished for not removing “hate speech” and “misinformation” fast enough – and the number of violations in this category is about a quarter of the total.

The New Mexico case is not the only one where Meta is being forced to pay up – in March, a Santa Fe jury ordered it to pay $375 million in a case involving child safety on Facebook and Instagram, and in August, the judge in that case added another $567 million for a youth mental health fund.

In August, 47 states reached a settlement with Meta, along with other social media companies, that will see them pay $17 billion. Judge Mathew mentioned this during the October 1 hearing, saying that due process suggests he should opt for a much lower amount than what the state of New Mexico is asking for.

During the hearing, Meta’s lawyer Matt Nicholson described the case as “about 26 statements over 11 years” and said that the state “made absolutely no showing that anyone in the state of New Mexico ever saw them, relied on them or were harmed by them in any way.”

McGinn countered that “the one thing you didn’t hear from counsel is an apology.”

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UK Police Arrest 15-Year-Old Over Posts Mocking Politician

Good news for those in the UK who were worried that their country’s police might have been getting a little too comfortable with the idea of going after people for what they say online.

No such luck.

We now learn that four officers, from the West Midlands force, were dispatched to the home of a 15-year-old, to arrest him. And this was no dawn raid to take in some dangerous terrorist suspect – it was a 15-year-old boy who had been making fun of a local councillor’s attire.

And the police seized his phone and laptop.

The whole thing started when the teenager, a Reform UK party activist, posted on Facebook about Conservative councillor Simon Bennett’s conduct and dress at council meetings in Wolverhampton.

Bennett reported the teenager to the police, saying that the posts were “quite personal about my appearance.”

One of the posts compared Bennett’s appearance to that of a “rent boy.” Another one said, “Why do some councillors rock up at a scrutiny committee in shorts and t-shirt in trainers? So unprofessional.”

And then there was one where the teenager Photoshopped rabbit ears onto a picture of Bennett, with the comment, “Nibble… nibble… crunch… crunch Can you hear it? That’s the sound of a rabbit devouring the last remaining shreds of Wolverhampton Conservatives’ credibility.”

Half asleep when the police came for him, the boy recalls the officers telling him that the arrest was for harassment, malicious communications, or a hate crime – or some mix of these. One officer said it was “to do with social media.”

The teenager, who has only been identified as Fraser, was taken in for questioning, and after that, he was bailed and banned from attending council meetings in Wolverhampton.

The police have not explained why four officers were needed to make the arrest.

“The police have not arrested for no reason,” he said. “There were a number of posts that targeted me…It was unpleasant and I was targeted by a child I had no way of dealing with.”

And the councillor also revealed that he had asked the council for advice on what to do, “and they thought it best to report it to the police.”

The police, in turn, “thought it merited arresting him,” Bennett said.

The Free Speech Union has taken up the case and intends to sue the police for “wrongful arrest” and “false imprisonment.”

Meanwhile, the group’s lawyers have written to the police to say that “plainly there has been no offence and the arrest and investigation represent an egregious interference with his rights.”

Fraser, who says he was more active online in criticizing the local Labour Party (which runs the council) than the Conservatives, is still waiting to learn if he will be charged.

This latest incident may just take the cake. Four officers, a laptop seized, and a teenager hauled off – for making fun of a councillor’s outfit. And the police wonder why they are losing the trust of the public.

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Retired Police Officer Convicted and Fined Over £1,000 for Sharing Bacon Meme About Child Marriage — Warns ‘Blasphemy Law Is Back’

Britain’s relentless crackdown on so-called “offensive” speech has produced yet another astonishing criminal conviction, this time against a retired police officer who spent nearly three decades serving the public.

Stephen Gray, 65, served nearly 30 years with Cleveland Police. He and his wife Alex, 62, have fostered children. None of that mattered once a neighbor he was already feuding with over a sewage pipe tipped off police about two posts Gray had reshared.

According to The Telegraph and the Free Speech Union, Gray was interviewed under caution, the Crown Prosecution Service initially decided there was no realistic prospect of conviction, and the neighbor then used the Victims’ Right to Review scheme to force the case back on. The neighbor was not Muslim.

At Newton Aycliffe Magistrates’ Court in April 2026, District Judge Steven Hood split the difference in the way only two-tier Britain can.

One post, “time for mass deportation,” paired with a caption about a supposed “12-year-old Mohammed” who wanted donors to move him from a three-star hotel to a five-star hotel with a better halal menu, free Wi-Fi, Sky, and a location nearer a girls’ school, was treated as politics.

The judge said it concerned an issue already debated in Parliament and acquitted Gray.

The second post was the one that counted. It showed a rasher of bacon next to a man in a turban, with the caption: “Fun facts about bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

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Cambridge University Declares Free Speech Should Be ‘Restricted’

Gonville and Caius College, one of Cambridge’s oldest foundations, is compelling its undergraduates to attend mandatory “inclusivity training” from the start of term.

The 90-minute sessions are being delivered by Stop Hate UK, a ‘charity’ activist organisation whose own materials tell students their free speech rights may be restricted, that “Islamophobia is a crime”, and that a facial expression can count as harm.

The order lands in the same university that spent the better part of two years investigating a philosopher for lawful speech, and in the same education system that has spent 2026 drilling children in white privilege, “racism requires power”, and compulsory hijabs.

According to an email from the college’s education and tutorial office, seen by The Spectator, “attendance by undergraduate students is mandatory. It is important for the community as a whole to ensure a collective and unified response.” The course, due to run from the week commencing 5 October, will cover “demonstrating inclusive behaviours” and “recognition of a hate incident and its impact.”

A Caius spokesman told The Spectator the college had, “in consultation with student representatives,” committed to “hosting facilitated discussions around inclusivity to support the whole community at Caius.”

That is a softer description than the email students actually received. Mandatory attendance and a demand for a “collective and unified response” is not a discussion. It is an instruction.

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Boston Globe Praised Harvard for Suppressing Free Speech to Save It

The Boston Globe (9/13/26) ran an article contrasting two Boston-area universities’ approaches to campus free speech. Penned by higher education reporter Mike Damiano, the piece reads like an installment of Highlights for Children‘s didactic “Goofus and Gallant” feature, with one school clearly doing it right while the other is letting down the cause of free speech.

Northeastern University plays the role of the loathsome Goofus, with critics remarking that the “school’s leaders have taken a hands-off approach to speech issues since cracking down on a pro-Palestinian protest encampment more than two years ago.”

Meanwhile Harvard, in Gallant fashion,

undertook a multi-year experiment in remaking campus speech norms with top-down reforms, resulting in what students and professors describe as a kind of thaw on a campus where tensions over politics, ideology and speech had thrust it into an acrimonious national debate.

That certainly makes it sound better than Northeastern’s “hands-off approach.” But you have to ask: What did Harvard’s leadership actually do for speech when they put their hands on it?

Well, for one thing, “they have nudged teaching fellows and professors to keep their personal politics out of the classroom.” Huh—telling faculty not to talk about their politics does not actually sound like promoting free speech.

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The far-left will import Europe’s methods of suppressing free speech to the USA

Hillary Clinton called half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables.” Joe Biden said, “Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic” – while his own Justice Department was trying to incarcerate Trump. Anderson Cooper asked Kamala Harris whether Trump was a fascist, and she answered, “Yes, I do. Yes, I do.”

The label was never just a label. Twitter banned Trump in January 2021 even though, as I discovered reporting on the Twitter Files, the company had concluded he did not violate its rules. Prosecutors then indicted him. A New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts.

Meanwhile, AP [Associated Press] calls the socialist mayor of New York not “far left” but rather “the democratic socialist leader of America’s largest city.”

In the five months after Trump’s inauguration last year, the networks used “far right” and similar labels 1,222 times. They used “far left” 86 times. Another analysis of more than 30 million articles found that American and British media use right-wing extremism labels more than three times as often as left-wing ones.

If you think this ended with the 2024 election, look at what the same people are doing in Europe, because that is the playbook they intend to bring back here [to the USA].

A German court sentenced a journalist to seven months in prison for a satirical image of the interior minister. Prosecutors raided the home of a pensioner who called the vice chancellor an idiot in a meme. Police carried out 46 home searches in a single day for online speech.

Election officials strike opposition candidates from ballots. A Romanian court annulled a presidential election. French judges banned Marine Le Pen from office and a court ordered her to wear an ankle monitor. German bureaucrats kept a local political candidate off the ballot for his interpretation of “Lord of the Rings.”

What they do over there matters over here. The European Commission fined X [Twiter] €120 million after, in the words of the House Judiciary Committee, it “successfully pressured major social media platforms to change their global content moderation rules.” Global means you.

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Founder of British Flag Flying ‘Raise the Colours’ Campaign Charged with 14 Offences

The creator of the campaign to raise British and English flags across the country to protest against illegal migrants being housed in hotels at taxpayer expense has been charged with 14 criminal offences, including using “threatening, abusive or insulting words”.

Thames Valley Police said on Sunday evening that Ryan Bridge, 45, of Blackwell has been charged with 14 offences relating to alleged incidents between January 31 and March 31 of this year in Oxfordshire.

According to GB News, Bridge was the founder of the Operation Raise the Colours campaign, which began last year in opposition to the government policy of taking alleged asylum seekers and placing them in hotels across the country at taxpayer expense.

The police force said that Bridge was charged with seven counts of using threatening words or behaviour to cause harassment, alarm or distress and three counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with intent to cause fear of, or provoke, unlawful violence.

He was also charged with two counts of racially aggravated intentional harassment, alarm or distress, one count of racially aggravated fear of violence, and one count of common assault.

Thames Valley Police said that they had decided to submit the case to the Crown Prosecution Service following a review of the evidence, witness statements, and video footage.

It comes as the left-wing-run Birmingham city council that they plan on spending around £2.6 million to remove British and English flags from the streets of the UK’s second city.

According to the Daily Telegraph, around 20,000 flags were raised by members of the public on street infrastructure as a part of the Raise the Colours campaign.

The decision to spend millions removing the national flags comes despite the Birmingham currently being in around £3.5 billion in debt, the most of any local government in Britain.

Meanwhile, in Oxfordshire — where the campaign begun — secured an injunction in July to bar anyone from attaching flags to lampposts or to pain the flag on the road.

Those who breach the injunction against raising the flag face potential prison sentences, fines, or even having assets seized, the BBC reported.

The Liberal Democrat leader of the Oxfordshire City Council, Tim Bearder, said at the time: “This is a welcome judgement. We’re very pleased with the result… This sets a legal precedent and will hopefully deter people in not just Oxfordshire but around the country from partaking in this criminal activity.”

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Trump Censorship Machine Loses Again in Court

The Trump administration’s crusade to crush campus criticism took another wallop on Friday in a California courtroom. Federal judge Noël Wise ruled that the Trump administration’s “ideological-deportation policy” brazenly violated the US Constitution.

The Stanford Daily—one of the best-known college student newspapers in the nation—sued the Trump administration for changing its “immigration policy and pattern of enforcement, namely by arresting, detaining, and deporting students with F-1 visas when those students use their freedom of speech to express opinions that the government does not like.” It asserted that the Trump administration’s “actions have specifically impacted Stanford Daily by decreasing the quantity and diversity of opinion pieces The Stanford Daily is able to publish on the conflict between Israel and Palestine.” Foreign students who had written on the issue requested that their previous articles be deleted, and other foreign students were no longer willing to comment on hot issues.

The Trump administration claims unlimited discretion to silence foreign students by deporting those whose opinions it disapproves of. Judge Wise wrote, “The language of the [First] Amendment makes clear that it is not the government that gives freedom of speech to the people. Instead, that freedom is imbued in the people. . . . It is not the government’s to take.” This is a notion that conservatives instinctively understand when it comes to the Second Amendment and the right of self-defense. But many people fail to recognize the same right for freedom of speech. Conor Fitzpatrick—the chief supervising attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)—which represented the student newspaper, declared, “Today’s ruling proves that free speech isn’t a privilege, but the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child.” FIRE president Greg Lukianoff clarified the scope of the ruling:

This ruling does NOT say the government must admit anyone, issue anyone a visa, or grant anyone citizenship. It says that once a person is lawfully here, the government cannot deport them because they engaged in protected speech. The government cannot tell a legal immigrant: An American is free to say this, but if you say it, you’re out.

George Porteous—Editor in Chief of Stanford Daily—hailed the decision: “The reporters in our newsroom shouldn’t have to fear that writing a story will result in their deportation. Today’s victory means they won’t have to.” But it remains to be seen whether this latest judicial rebuff slows the Trump censorship juggernaut.

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Judge Tosses Lawsuit Over State Investigations into Texas Teachers’ Posts About Charlie Kirk

Following the murder of conservative icon Charlie Kirk in 2025, The Gateway Pundit reported that more than 100 educators across the state of Texas faced investigations for their vile, hateful, and violent content celebrating his assassination.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) announced that the Texas Education Agency (TEA) began the investigations into teachers who cheered Kirk’s murder and potentially incited additional violence online.

In a strongly worded letter to superintendents, TEA Commissioner Mike Morath condemned the educators’ despicable behavior, noting that such conduct may constitute violations of the Educators’ Code of Ethics.

Not wanting to be held accountable for their behavior, in January 2026,  the Texas American Federation of Teachers (Texas AFT) filed a First Amendment lawsuit in federal court against the Texas Education Agency and Commissioner Morath, asking a judge to stop the state investigations so they can be as grotesque on social media as they want.

Texas AFT, along with the national AFT president, the far-left radical Randi Weingarten,  and Texas president Zeph Capo, claimed Morath’s letter created a “vague, overbroad crackdown on off-duty political speech, chilled teachers, and led to leave, reprimands, doxxing, a temporary ‘do not hire’ flag,” and at least one firing.

The state, however, argued the letter was not a new policy and pointed to existing ethics rules. Districts, not TEA, made most employment decisions.

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